This story opens with Kurt the ever disconsolate man, still abusing his health by forgetting his insulin shots, still overweight and drinking too much and still lonely. A new health concern is troubling him as he has occasional times when he realizes he can't remember what he has just done, or why he is someplace. As he worries about being sixty, other life changes are the move to a rural home and the acquisition of a dog.

His daughter Linda announces that she is pregnant and excited about having her child. The father is her significant other, Hans von Enke, financier and son of a retired naval officer who had been a submarine commander, and his wife Louise, who had been a language teacher.  After the birth of Linda’s child, Kurt is drawn into their lives.

The mystery really starts when he is invited to meet Hans' parents and then later to attend Hakan's 75th birthday party, where Kurt had been drawn aside by Hakan and engaged in a conversation that Kurt senses had a subtext that kept eluding him. The fact that Hakan seems frightened by a man lurking nearby, but outside, during the conversation did not escape Kurt.

This becomes important when not too long after the party Hakan leaves the house for his usual walk and never returns. It is summer and Kurt has time on his hands and is immediately drawn into investigating the disappearance.

In doing so, he retraces the high and low points of Hakan's naval career and realizes that Hakan's actions during the Cold War and his hard stand on possible Russian submarines invading Swedish waters was the worst of the low points. From here he starts investigating some of Hakan's co-workers and close friends during that time that still seem to be close to him these many years later.

Kurt begins working ex-officio with Ytterberg, the local police officer in charge of the investigation. They determine that Louise was Hakan's closest friend and everyone becomes persuaded that Hakan must have been killed since he was not the type to have committed suicide. When Louise suddenly goes missing and is discovered dead with secret military documents in her purse it leads to the assumption that she was the mysterious Russian spy Sweden has been seeking for a long time.

Kurt methodically works his way toward the ultimate resolution of this case with its unexpected ending. New characters are well developed and others are all too familiar to most fans. This is almost a languorous journey through Sweden's relationships with Russian and the United States during the post war period; a slight departure from his interest in the Swedish social issues of the times.

--Thea Davis